RITUALISM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 442, 21 November 1908, Page 4

RITUALISM.

Bishops Attacked.

Svdnky, November 18

At the amiual meeting of the Church of England Association, the report declared that every effort had been made to uphold the principles of the Reformation and to counteract the pernicious Ritualistic teaching. The bishops were blamed for the introduction of the false doctrines and ritualistic practices which had taken such a firm foothold in the Church. The Episcopal Bench in England has been filled with Romanising bishops, who permitted the introduction of mediaeval superstition and sacramental idolatries.

The aim of the society, continued the report, was to resist the spread of a system of sacerdotal despotism which threatened to undermine the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and restore the mass and confessional, the blasphemous doctrine of the trausubstautiation. It was sad to record, but it was a startling fact, that 3,000 clergy were wearing illegal vestments, using dim religious light, and gaudy, ostentatious colours and vestments that allured men to Ritualism.

The position, it was urged, was intolerable, and called for drastic action.

The president attacked the Bishop of Stepney (Dr Como Gordon Lang), who had intended visiting Australia, for his extreme Ritualism, and added that his appointment to the See of York would no doubt cause consternation in England, as it did here. It was hard, he said, that York should have such a Ritualist forced on it.